The Budapest-born violinist Endre Wolf, who has died aged 97, spent most of his career in northern Europe. For a decade he was active in Manchester and appeared at the Henry Wood Proms in London. Before and after then, he was a significant figure in Swedish musical life.

When Wolf gave the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Hallé Orchestra under John Barbirolli in 1951, the King's Hall of Belle Vue zoo was still being used in place of the bomb-damaged Free Trade Hall. The then Manchester Guardian looked forward to a return visit by the soloist. In a concert in York Minster as part of that year's Festival of Britain, the Yorkshire Evening Post admired his "eloquence and sheer wizardry" in Bach's Partita in D Minor.

Wolf made his home in Manchester as professor at the Royal Manchester (now the Royal Northern) College of Music from 1954 to 1964. In 1954, he performed the Brahms Double Concerto at a Prom with the Hallé, Barbirolli and the French cellist André Navarra. It proved a favourite work for the two string players, who gave it another four times together in the Royal Albert Hall, up to 1963. Other Proms saw Wolf playing the solo concertos by Mendelssohn, Beethoven (twice) and Brahms (twice).

In 1958 Wolf's account of the Brahms concerto with Anthony Collins conducting the Sinfonia of London proved a notable early commercial use of stereo by the World Record Club. It is now available as an online download. The previous year, Wolf had toured Italy with Barbirolli.

Wolf was the son of a Hungarian seamstress mother and a watchmaker father from what is now Chernivtsi in Ukraine. When he was four, Wolf persuaded them to buy him the violin he had seen in a Budapest shop window. He studied under the great Hungarian Jenö Hubay. Though in adult life he was barely 5ft tall, he had a striking presence.

The young musician practised while observing his father making and repairing watches. He learned the craft so well that he could finish the work in hand during his father's final illness in the 1930s, but was denied a university place to study engineering because of limits on the number of Jewish students.

In 1936 the Hungarian police reversed their refusal of a passport to Sweden after his aunt showed them a letter of invitation from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and told them: "Here is another opportunity to get rid of a Jew." He was leader of the orchestra from 1936 to 1946, and through the second world war years gave solo and string-quartet tours throughout neutral Sweden. In 1944 he secured Swedish passports for his family, thus saving them from the death camps and enabling them to take refuge in a safe house in Budapest.

After the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he arranged for his mother and his sister's family to join him in Britain, paying for the education of his nephew Peter Kertesz. After leaving Manchester, Wolf taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Lund University, and the Swedish Radio music school, near Stockholm. As professor at the Royal College in the capital, he performed well into his 80s, and on his 90th birthday at Lund Cathedral. He had settled at nearby Blentarp with his second wife, the violinist Jennifer Nuttall-Wolf, a professor at Malmö Academy of Music. She survives him. His first marriage, to his German wife, Antoinette, ended in divorce during his time in Manchester.